I happened to come across this absorbing article: Whales are people too! and in then the word speciesism (a one word tongue twister, say it out loud, quickly, twice in a row!)

Now, I’ve lost of count the number of managers/executives who proudly say that their organisations are doing Agile (whatever that means ) and refer to people as ‘resources’. In light of Mr D. Adams’ observation (that humans are the third most intelligent species on earth) it is possible that these enlightened managers are right after all. We are all resources.

However, on a serious note, it is worth considering, since dolphins have a strong claim to rights, if our developers also need some rights. Also more pragmatically, always keeping this in mind makes management effective, and true; Not a wished based glossing over the real people development and attitude issues and avoiding necessary but difficult conversations until it’s too late. A team of people, are not simply a summation of individuals, and their interactions can easily be unpredictable, someone leaving the team, could result in a productivity increase, or even velocity increase. If only developers were people.

N.B: Prima facie this is tangential, but on second glance quite central to Scrum. In this article I’m not being sarcastic, but tongue-in-cheek. (Note on N.B to some readers: These things have to be explained to most ‘resource managers’ in the ICT industry)

ScrumCoach

A development coach, mostly teaching Scrum and TDD. I've 18 years of s/w dev experience, some of it brilliant, a good bit mind-numbing, most of it pedestrian and even a little bit disastrous. I've been a programmer, analysts, tester, project manager and worked in various countries with all sorts of people (or is that 'resources'?)